In this month’s installment of the “We’re Listening” blog series, Steve Young discusses customer feedback to the Technical Assistance Center (TAC), and what his team is doing to address your main concerns with TAC support. Steve is Director of the TAC’s Service Delivery Transformation efforts.

By Guest Contributor Steve Young

You’ve shared a lot about your experience with the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) – the many positive experiences as well as areas for improvement. We continuously review these multiple sources of customer listening data to ensure we are addressing your biggest concerns with your support experience.

One of your main concerns is not getting to the right expert right away. When you have an issue, you don’t want to be bounced around the TAC.

In response, we’ve implemented intelligent matching into our case management routing engine. Now, when you contact Cisco for technical support, our routing engine uses multiple characteristics to match your issue to the right TAC expert. These characteristics include what we know about you, your issue, our available engineers and their expertise

We use the technology, sub-technology and problem codeyou provide when you open a case and match that against our available engineer’s skills profiles. For example, if you were to contact technical support with a concern about your Cisco Firewall, you might enter “Security: Network Firewalls and Intrusion Prevention Systems” for the technology, “FWSM (Firewall Services Module)” for the sub-technology, and “Configuration Assistance” for the problem code. We would evaluate available Security/Firewall engineers for their experience and skill level with configuration issues on the Firewall Services Module and connect you with the best expert to solve the problem.

Since implementing this new capability, we’ve seen a decline in negative feedback around getting to the right expert. Where it used to be your top verbatim complaint in our Walker Customer Satisfaction survey, it is no longer a “top three” item.

To continue this improvement trend, we will further invest in our routing engine to intelligently match you to the right engineer, adding characteristics such as case history and language to the system over the next several months.

This is one of the many changes you can expect to see as we transform our business processes and tools to bring you a better support experience. Look for an upcoming blog update on this transformation, when we’ll explain how the TAC teams are using collaboration to solve your problems faster.

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